Archives for May 24, 2010

It occurred to me earlier this year that I couldn’t remember the last time I took a full-fledged two-week vacation, by which I meant two weeks spent away from home during which I (A) saw no shows and (B) wrote no pieces. When I shared this piece of information with Mrs. T, she promptly informed me that I’d better change my ways if I wanted to remain happily married. I know marching orders when I hear them, so I planned and booked a spring holiday and gave my editors at The Wall Street Journal several months’ worth of fair warning. Given the fact that the past year has seen, among countless other things, the opening of The Letter and the publication of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, I figured I’d earned some time off.
It is, of course, proverbial that the surest way to hear God laugh is to make a plan. Three Sundays ago I took Mrs. T to an emergency room in Chicago at two in the morning. Two sets of doctors, the first in Chicago and the second in Connecticut, thereupon spent the following two weeks trying to figure out exactly what was wrong with her (gallstones) and what to do about it (nothing invasive, thank God). On Tuesday she was discharged from the University of Connecticut Health Center, and yesterday we hit the road.
You will note that I haven’t said where we went, where we are now, or where we’re going next. Nor will I. The plug is well and truly pulled. I wrote and filed this week’s Wall Street Journal columns in advance of our departure, but I’m taking next week off from the paper, the first time I’ve done so since I fell ill five years ago and the second time since I became the Journal‘s drama critic seven years ago. Like I said, this is a vacation, really and truly. We are, for all intents and purposes, incommunicado: I won’t be checking my e-mail or voicemail other than sporadically, and I’m not going to write anything at all.
I’ve uploaded the usual almanac entries, weekly videos, and theater-related postings for the next two weeks, so you’ll see my ghostly presence during our absence. It’s just possible–barely–that I might tweet once or twice about the joys of taking it easy. Otherwise, though, I will have nothing to say on any subject whatsoever, here or anywhere else, until June 7.
If you happen to see me between now and then, kindly keep it to yourself.

“So large a part of human life passes in a state contrary to our natural desires, that one of the principal topics of moral instruction is the art of bearing natural calamities. And such is the certainty of evil, that it is the duty of every man to furnish his mind with those principles that may enable him to act under it with decency and propriety.”
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, July 7, 1750 (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)